The researchers took the sounds of more than 3,000 words in English and subdivided each by its phonetic features — in other words, what a person does with his mouth, lungs and vocal cords to produce the sounds of each word.

"We could then represent each word in a multidimensional space," Christiansen told LiveScience.

This multidimensional space, similar to a simple coordinate-system graph, gave researchers a chance to see where each noun and verb fell relative to all the others.

"Each word is a point in this sound-based, or phonological, space," Christiansen explained, adding that the distance between the words could be calculated.

The nouns were closer to other nouns, and the verbs were closer to other verbs.

About 65 percent of all nouns have another noun as its nearest neighbor, and about the same percentage of all verbs have another verb next door, Christiansen said.

Math can be used in any discipline. That's part of what makes it so beautiful--and so practical.